Penn and Teller interview

Illusionists Penn and Teller barely communicate outside work – but after 35
years together they still create the most beautiful shows on earth. Ahead of
their first British performances for 16 years, Benjamin Secher went to Las
Vegas to ask them how they do it
.

Two broad-hipped American women stumble through the revolving doors of the Rio Hotel and Casino into the arid Las Vegas afternoon. One is holding the kind of yard-long plastic vessel that in this town passes as a cocktail glass. The other is clutching her head.

“I don’t wanna see another mar-ja-rita as long as I live,” says the latter, in a voice as thick as molasses. “Mar-ga-rita,” says her friend, with considerable effort. “Margarita, marjarita,” snaps the first. “I don’t wanna see any kind of rita.” Temptation, indulgence, regret: it is just gone two on a Wednesday and the Vegas merry-go-round is spinning at full tilt.

In an empty theatre at the back of the Rio – past the receptionist who ends every exchange with a disconcerting “Good luck!”, past the tireless go-go dancer on her perch between the slot machines and the convenience store, past the priceless paintings by Cy Twombly and Ellsworth Kelly that hang like neglected hunting trophies in the hotel corridors – I meet an earnest, balding man who talks in an animated whisper about beauty, and quotes Poe and Sondheim until he moves himself to tears.

This is Teller (he long ago dispensed with his given name, Raymond) a prodigiously talented 62-year-old magician who is coming next week to London where he and his partner Penn Jillette, a 6ft 6in pony-tailed comedian seven years his junior, will perform for five nights at the Hammersmith Apollo. Together the two men comprise one of the greatest anomalies in modern Vegas.

“We absolutely don’t belong here,” admits Penn later, sitting in his dressing room. “When we first came to Vegas it was considered a total joke.” That was nine years ago. Today they perform to enthusiastic crowds, six nights a week, 46 weeks of the year in a vast theatre that bears their names, raking in more money than either can quite fathom.

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“This is going to sound horrible, but I don’t even know how much I make in a year,” says Penn, who lives in a huge eccentric house 10 miles into the Mojave desert, with his wife Emily and their two children Moxie Crimefighter, five, and Zolten Penn, four. Teller lives a few miles away, alone. “It must be, you know, a couple of million dollars, a few million. I know it’s more money than my dad, a jail guard, made in his lifetime; more money than I’ll ever need.”

Penn and Teller’s act has little of the razzmatazz one associates with Vegas. No showgirls, no fireworks, no tigers. Instead it is suffused with the kind of irony, scepticism and ephemeral beauty that you will struggle to find on a stage anywhere else in this town. Teller turns silver coins into shimmering goldfish, causes a rose to shed its petals simply by snipping at its shadow, and strikes up a touching friendship with a red ball that leaps through a hoop, chases at his heels and springs to and fro like an overexcited spaniel.

“Doing beautiful things is its own reward,” he says, when I ask what enjoyment he can still derive from a trick he has pulled off many thousands of times before. “If you do something that you’re proud of, that someone else understands, that is a thing of beauty that wasn’t there before – you can’t beat that.” He gulps suddenly, like a snake trying to swallow an egg, and when he speaks again his voice has a wobble to it.

“There is that great line in Sunday in the Park with George,” he says, referring to Stephen Sondheim’s 1984 musical about Georges Seurat, “ 'Look, I made a hat where there never was a hat’.” He falls silent again and, as unexpectedly as those coins turn to fish, big fat tears start rolling down his cheeks. “I can’t say that line without choking up, because it states, in profoundly poetic terms, what I have always wanted to do with my life. It’s so simple and so funny, but boy it hits me deep.”

On stage Teller is mute except when an audience member is invited to participate in a trick – to have his mobile phone spirited away then rediscovered inside the belly of a fish, or to verify that the .357 Magnums the performers fire at each other at the climax of the show do indeed contain genuine bullets – and at those moments you can see his lips moving, uttering inaudible reassurances to the volunteer unsettled by the spotlights, or by Penn’s menacing manner.

Penn dominates the stage, pointing, spouting like an evangelist, encouraging us to see the big ideas behind the wizardry, plucking at his double bass, doing dangerous looking things with a nailgun, cracking jokes at the expense of Homeland Security or dispensing a running commentary on Teller’s sleights of hand. He also has a habit of giving away the tricks – before Teller’s red ball act, he declares “this is done with a thread!” – something he describes as “a kind of peace offering” to the audience but which some of the other magicians in Vegas see as a professional blasphemy.

He couldn’t care less what they think. “I have always hated magic,” he says. “I have always hated the basic undercurrent of magic which Jerry Seinfeld put best when he said: 'All magic is “Here’s a quarter, now it’s gone. You’re a jerk. Now it’s back. You’re an idiot. Show’s over”.’ I never wanted to grow up to be a magician. It was never my goal.” He would rather have been a rock star, he says, but the business seemed already saturated with extraordinarily talented people. “So my thinking was, and I will say this outright, music is full of people I absolutely love. I don’t have a chance. They are all better than me. Magic has, ooh, nobody in it that I like.” He rocks back in his chair, cackling. “This is the field for me!”

Everything about Penn and Teller seems to defy conventional wisdom. Here are two men who value the world of ideas: Penn counts Bob Dylan, Stephen Fry and Richard Dawkins among his friends; when in New York, Teller has tea with Sondheim. And yet they have taken up residence in perhaps the most mindless town in the United States. They are creatively restless: in addition to their show, their current projects include producing a film about “the secret technology that was probably behind Vermeer’s work”, directing an off-Broadway play (Teller), and writing a book about atheism (Penn). But they have signed up to a deal that compels them to perform a show in the same hotel, at the same time, night after night.

And, most curious of all, they have worked together for an unbroken run of 35 years yet, even now, they appear utterly incompatible: the tall shouty one who thinks and laughs; the small quiet one who feels and cries. “We are artistic and business partners, not primarily friends,” Teller says. “When we look at each other, we don’t think: 'Now there’s a likeable chap!’ We think about the projects we are doing and how we will get them done. When we were first working together, we didn’t have such thick skins. But we recognised how useful we were to each other. And that prevailed.”

Penn says we should compare their relationship not to a loveless marriage but to that of “two guys manning a 7/11 down the street. If they aren’t best buddies what do they care, as long as the coffee machine is working and the shelves are stacked? Teller and I work together every day, but socially we go out together maybe only once a year.”

They first met in Philadelphia in 1974. Teller was a high school Latin teacher who did magic in his spare time. It had gripped him with the force of an obsession since, as a five year-old laid up at home with a heart ailment, he had sent away “15 cents and three Mars bar wrappers” for a magic kit advertised on television. Penn was a student and a juggler with a fierce distaste for magicians. “Early on, Teller said to me that magic was essentially an intellectual art form which, when you picture the kind of dips---s that do magic, sounds like an insane thing to say,” he says. “Can you do magic without insulting the audience? Can you do magic that is intellectually satisfying? It is those questions, rather than the magic itself, that fascinates me. Those are the question that we have been playing with for 35 years.”

Penn and Teller’s earliest performances were for something called the Asparagus Valley Cultural Society, an irreverent three-man show that combined magic, music, juggling and comedy. In 1982, the third member of the group, a musician named Weir Chrisemer, dropped out and Penn and Teller emerged as a double act, taking to the road with an embryonic version of the comedy magic show they perform today. “We would drive eight hours in a car together, then do a show together, then share a hotel room, then get up and have breakfast together,” Penn recalls. “If one of us wanted to get laid the other person had to go out and sit in the parking lot. That might have been unsustainable. But, as soon as we made money, the tension went away.”

They didn’t have to wait long. By 1985, “Penn & Teller” was playing off Broadway in New York to rave reviews. From there, they went on to ever bigger national tours, to television (both at home and, in 1994, over here on Channel 4), to world domination and eventually in 2001, to Vegas, where they have remained ever since.

“When you say to people in New York: 'I think we’re going to go do our show in Vegas’, it’s a little like if you were a fine artist and you said to your painter friends: 'I think from now on I am only going to paint pictures of Jesus Christ and Elvis on velvet in fluorescent paint’,” Penn says. “They look at you like puppies watching TV.” He tilts his face to one side, effects a blank stare and allows his tongue to loll in his mouth.

“But then you come out here and it turns out, as insane as this is, that you have more artistic freedom in Las Vegas than you have in New York. Much more. And the reason is this…” He leans forward conspiratorially and says, in a stage whisper. “In Vegas, our investors don’t give a f--- about us. The people who are our bosses see our show maybe once a year. One of them will bring their kids and come by. And they are pleasant and they love us and they sincerely enjoy the show. Then they leave and they don’t think about us.

“And because nobody’s paying attention we do exactly the show we want. As long as people come to see it nobody cares what we do. And it means that we have done wilder things and more new stuff here than we ever did in New York. The contract is 100 per cent between us and the audience. And that’s crazy.” He laughs until his eyes close into two half moons behind his spectacles; it looks as though he has three smiles on his face.

Teller, who says his most memorable Vegas encounter was with “the rotting corpse of a burro” he once stumbled across while riding in the desert, is more muted in his contentment, but content none the less. “It’s still astonishing to me that we have an audience here,” he says. “The fact that people will go to a Cirque de Soleil show across town where there are 85 people all painted up like Dr Seuss characters doing gymnastics and then they’ll come here to watch two driven, eccentric, somewhat violent people placing their hearts on the stage remains amazing to me. It’s inexplicable.”

Penn & Teller will be interviewed on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross tonight

Penn & Teller are at Hammersmith Apollo, London W6 from Wed to next Sun